WEEKEND - Washington Free Beacon: ///. . . ...From the Supreme Court to the supremely titled (and entitled), Philip Terzian reviews Heirs & Graces: A History of the Modern British Aristocracy by Eleanor Doughty. ....----------------------------------....... https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!xQqw!,w_1100,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3ba1c635-a050-4ffe-9835-d831de53c276_695x491.jpeg Every society has an aristocracy, even those that deny or disparage the very idea, such as our own. The word derives from a Greek term roughly meaning ‘rule of the best’ which, it goes without saying, means different things to different people. “In England this was usually defined as the families that accumulated vast swaths of land, served, counseled, and (at times) challenged the ruling monarchs, fought the battles that protected their country’s primacy and, as peers of the realm, transposed themselves into regional dynasties and feudal lords. In America we began with aristocrats who, as landed gentry and local governors, resembled their European equivalents. Now, four centuries later, we tend to think of them in different terms: The commercial aristocrats of the 19th century—the Morgans, Mellons, Rockefellers, and Schiffs—of varying origins, or the 20th-century political dynasties (Taft, Roosevelt, Bush, Kennedy) of varying quality. I once heard Tina Turner described as ‘rock aristocracy.’ Only in America, as it were. “It’s different across the Atlantic, of course, and Eleanor Doughty, a British journalist who has made a career chronicling the ‘moneyed and titled classes’ of her native land, has produced a long, fair, detached, and (perhaps a little too) detailed account of the ‘modern British aristocracy,’ those hundreds of surviving remnants of the titled ruling classes who, for centuries after 1066, possessed colossal wealth, built great estates, and wielded decisive influence in Britain. “That such a volume is now published here in America, and may find a substantial audience, should surprise no one. Whenever a member of the royal family visits the United States, attracting huge crowds and stopping by the White House for a black-tie dinner, we are invariably reproached and reminded that we fought a revolution to rid ourselves of kings, queens, lords, and ladies. True enough. But tell that to readers of Nancy Mitford’s novels or to the millions of our fellow countrymen who tuned in to both TV and movie dramatizations (1981, 2008) of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. Not so long ago, millions of high-minded PBS viewers hung on to the weekly adventures—the dynastic crises, domestic dramas, and financial woes—of the fictional Crawley family of Downton Abbey, in Yorkshire, seat of the imaginary earls of Grantham.”